Back On The Silk Road

As I mentioned in a previous post, there just wasn’t much to see in Shiraz, aside from Persepolis, which lays a 120km outside the city. I was no doubt happy to leave, but more so, happy to be heading to Yazd, a city with old and ancient links to the inner Asian trade routes.

For an Iranian city Yazd is not that old: ‘only’ dating back to Sassanian times, roughly 3rd to 5th century A.D. But that shouldn’t fool anyone: Yazd is old and it feels that way too. After the Arabs conquered it in 642AD it became an important way station on the caravan routes running from Arab Kashgar (now in China) to the Levant (modern day Lebanon, Syria and Israel), sending its carpets, delicate brocades and silks all over the world. Marco Polo passed through in the late 13th century and had many good things to say about it. The city is lucky too. Yazd managed to avoid destruction by both Genghis Khan and Tamerlame. The old city or medina is a curious mix of Timurid, Safavid and a smattering of Seljuk thrown in for good measure.

The first monument that greeted us was a large portal called Chaqmakh Square, named after a trusted lieutenant of Tamerlane. The Emir Chaqmakh portal once led into a large covered bazaar that was razed to the ground by Mahmud the Afghan around 1722. The entire city, even the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence on the south side of town are clearly visible from the top of Chaqmakh, but it was the towering rectangular entry portal of the Yazd Friday Mosque that dominated the skyline; its gorgeous turquoise tiles and thulth calligraphy create a shimmering effect, like an oasis in the desert. The mosque sits on what used to be a Fire Temple and a newer 11th century building, most likely a Ghaznavid mosque. Unusual for a Persian mosque, the Yazd mosque has only one iwan unlike every other we had seen on the trip, which were based on the classical four-iwan plan. Later, after a close up inspection of the mosque I saw a small, well-concealed flying buttress supporting the portal. Was it new or part of the original construction? Certainly something I would be keen on finding out, as I’ve never seen an unconcealed buttress of this sort used in mosque construction.

After we wandered around the mosque we ducked into a small brick stairway descending into the city’s main qanat. A qanat, identical to the karez one finds in East Turkestan, brings water into the city. Starting high up in the mountains where the ‘king well’ is sunk, they flow in some places for up to 50 miles or more. After the ‘king well’ is sunk a small canal is dug underground.

“Why underground,” my father asked Ahmad?

“To prevent evaporation,” he replied.

“Scorching desert heat, ya know, Dad?”

Some of the canals are hundreds of years old. Earlier, while we were at the Yazd Water Museum, we saw a Qanat Shareholders Agreement. Twelve families pledged to work a week, on a rotating basis, for the upkeep of the qanat and also to share the water from it too.

As father and I descended it got cooler and cooler and by the time we descended to the bottom it was at least ten degrees Celsius cooler than in the courtyard of the mosque: a great relief from the hot Yazdi sun. We saw an old man with a long stick cleaning out the grates leading into a main pool where for many years people had come to get their drinking and cooking water from all over the city.

After the obligatory photos we clambered up the steps and walked towards the Mosque of the Twelve Imams. Before we got there, however, I caught view of a small factory where people were weaving the brocade that made Yazd famous back in Polo’s time. The materials were gorgeous, iridescent paisley’s winking in what little natural light was let into the factory. It was clear from the construction of the wooden looms that little had changed since Polo’s time, too. Women sat, veiled, weaving as they have for at least a thousand years.

Having traveled the width and breadth of the Silk Road these last 4 years, many times I would stopped and ask the locals if they still made fabrics, or pottery or food the way a medieval traveler described it, like Polo, or Benjamin of Tudela or Babur.

“Were tools and other goods made and used the way they were in the past?” I once asked a woman in Samarkand if red velvet was still made there, as Babur had indicated in his memoirs.

“No,” she told me. “The Communists wrecked all the old industries, better for progress.”

I remember the Silk factory in the Ferghana; one of the few traditional industries the Communists did leave alone. Of course, I looked for similar Byzantine traditions in Trabzon, something, really anything other than buildings, as a way of reaching back into the past and knowing it, touching it, rendering the present a pale verisimilitude of the past. Alas, as elsewhere, the new had come to displace the old in Trabzon as well.

But in Yazd, however, I was pleased to see the old rhythms of life; to feel the old way of measuring time and passing the days, and seeing it flourish.

I also realized how much I enjoy being on the Silk Road. Isfahan was a gift that I will cherish forever. Persepolis, Pasargardae and Naqsh-i-Rustam were too. But it was the Silk Road, to travel from Yazd to Khorasan and then back to Rayy and Tehran that brought me here in the first place.

Walking through the medina I heard the slow moaning murmur of the Azan, the Muslim call to prayer and I sensed more fully the rhythms of the inner Asian trade routes. I was more attentive to the smells, sounds and looks of the people; seeing more that was familiar, as if there were some unifying thread between Kashgar, over 2,000 miles away, and Yazd. No, there weren’t camels and goats in the streets like there are in Kashgar; and no, there aren’t fields of thirsty cotton like those in Uzbekistan, but the similarities are real. The tiles, the prevalence of turquoise, the music with its Turkish syncopation and Farsi lilt; the smells, from curry and cardamom to the musty smell of desert after a short rain and the sand, everywhere links Trabzon and Xi’an in a unity of purpose that still, if only faintly, exists.

Ahmad snapped me out of my reverie.

“Sean, here,” he said, pointing towards a slight mosque with a small dome,” is what you wanted to see. But honestly, I do not understand it. It’s too old and there isn’t much left.”

“True,” I replied, a bit disappointed. There wasn’t much left. “This is the Mosque of the Twelve Imams,” I asked myself?

I walked towards it and impatiently stepped through the threshold. Immediately I was taken back a thousand years. This simple square mosque with four tri-lobed squinches, an uneasy zone of transition, a belt of Kufic and a clean mortar dome took me back a thousand years. The band of Kufic calligraphy, a wonderful floral pattern in dark blue with golden borders, was unlike any I had ever seen before. Even more impressive were the stucco ornament remains that harkened back to a style clearly related to the ornamental style from the Samarra palaces of the Abbasids, one of three predecessors to all subsequent forms of ornament. From the looks of it one wouldn’t know how special this mosque is, but this mosque, dating back a thousand years, to the 10th century, is special. This mosque is nearly the contemporary of Shah Ismail Samani’s mausoleum in Bukhara, but looks nothing like it. No brick ornamentation, no banks of turquoise tile, just stucco covering baked bricks and painted ornament and design in the interior. This mosque comes from a wholly different and earlier Muslim tradition and has all the elements of the West and none of the Ghaznavids and Seljuks who would soon merge styles to create a wholly new and independent school of architecture.

I hadn’t expected to see anything like this on my trip, assuming that most works of this sort had been consumed in the Mongol cataclysm. It was nice to see that some things, however insignificant, endure.